By Joseph FitzMcBobe
June 6, 2025 – Bamenda, Ambazonia:
In a rare moment of piercing honesty and emotional vulnerability, a Camerounian soldier—his identity shielded for fear of reprisal—has issued a heartfelt message to his fellow officers in the colonial forces stationed across war-torn Ambazonia. His words, soaked in anguish and disillusionment, echo a deeper truth long buried beneath propaganda and military orders: the soldiers of La République du Cameroun are not just fighting a losing war; they are fighting their own people—and losing their souls in the process.
“We are not the sword against our people,” the message begins—an opening line that slices through the veneer of patriotic duty and reveals the moral agony endured by many of these young men, conscripted into a war they no longer believe in.
He reminds his fellow police officers, gendarmes, and military personnel that those they are brutalizing in the streets—those being kicked, teargassed, and locked up—are not “terrorists” or “secessionists” as the regime insists. They are family.
“They are our parents, our friends, our neighbors,” he writes, his voice trembling between rage and remorse.
For years, the soldiers of Cameroun have been used as human shields for a dying regime—ordered to crush dissent, enforce curfews, shoot into peaceful crowds, and execute orders that leave villages in cinders and children orphaned. But the faceless masses they are asked to suppress are not the enemy. They are simply a people crying out for justice, for work, for dignity.
“They are holding accountable a regime that has emptied the coffers, stolen dreams, and made our uniform a shield for its crimes,” the soldier laments, exposing the moral decay at the heart of Paul Biya’s colonial dictatorship. “But we’re not the guard dogs of a rotten power. We’re sons of this people.”
His voice grows even more desperate as he paints a picture of shared misery. These same soldiers—tools of tyranny—are not exempt from the hardship. They wait in the same dilapidated hospitals with no medicine, they weep in the same markets where prices rise like smoke, and they cash the same meagre salaries that barely feed their families.
This war, he reveals, is not just unwinnable—it is senseless. A battle where both the oppressor and the oppressed are victims, and where the only victors are the corrupt men in power and their foreign backers.
“So I’m telling you,” the soldier pleads, “the day we’re asked to shoot, let’s put down our arms.” In that moment, he does not speak as a machine of war, but as a son of the soil—calling for courage not in the barrel of a gun, but in the refusal to be used against one’s own.
“True courage isn’t blind obedience,” he declares, “it’s protecting our people against those who strangle them.”
This impassioned appeal comes at a time when cracks are visibly widening within the colonial military’s ranks. Desertions are rising. Whispers of disobedience echo in the barracks. The war in Ambazonia, once trumpeted as a “short security operation,” has morphed into an endless bloodbath with no strategic goal and no public support—even within Cameroun itself.
Yet amidst the gloom, this soldier’s message strikes a chord of fragile hope: that the tide may yet turn, not through foreign intervention, but through a moral awakening from within.
“The Cameroon we love,” he concludes, “will not be freed by fear, but by unity between its army and its citizens. The people are not your target. They’re your cause.”
As bullets continue to fly and villages continue to burn in Ambazonia, the world must pause to listen—not just to the cries of the oppressed, but to the whispers of conscience within the oppressor’s own ranks.
Let this message echo in every outpost, every garrison, and every soldier’s heart: This war is not ours. This war must end.
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